In the past decade computers have changed the way that we communicate with each other. Instant messaging, social networking websites, video conferences, and file transfers allow us to provide information to each other with greater speed and convenience than ever before. In particular, Internet telephone calls and web cameras have made audio and visual communication (e.g., teleconferencing and virtual workplaces) more common. For many companies, a more geographically diverse workforce causes them to rely heavily upon teleconferencing. For employees in cubicles, teleconferencing means holding a phone to their ear for hours or wearing a headset that keeps them tethered to their workstations.
Beamforming technology is a signal processing technique that takes advantage of interference between the individual elements of arrays of transmitting or receiving transducers (e.g., loudspeakers or microphones) to control the directionality of a signal (e.g., focus the direction of the output sound). Beamforming, applied to loudspeaker arrays, allows sound output from speaker arrays to be focused into areas of high volume and nearby areas of low volume. However, due to the wide bandwidth of audible sounds, beamforming requires a great deal of precision to produce high quality directivity over the entire frequency range. This high degree of precision is difficult to achieve in practice. For example, small variations in the manufacturing tolerances of speakers provide sufficient differences in the speaker functionality to produce an unusable output.